Christopher Hampton Circling Simone De Beauvoir-Nelson Algren Affair Drama With Anne Fontaine; Talks ‘White Chameleon’ Big Screen Hopes
deadline.comOscar-winning writer Christopher Hampton is in talks to write a screenplay with French director Anne Fontaine about iconic feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Nelson Algren’s transatlantic affair.
The playwright and screenwriter, who has won Oscars for The Father (2021) and Dangerous Relations (1989) and was also nominated for Atonement (2008), revealed he was in the early stages of the project during a masterclass at the Doha Film Institute’s Qumra event on Monday. “We had an initial discussion followed by a more detailed discussion a week ago.
I really want to do it,” he told Deadline in an interview after the talk. De Beauvoir and Algren met in Chicago in 1947 and immediately embarked on a passionate affair that endured for more than 20 years in spite of the complications of transatlantic travel and communication at the time.
Paris-based intellectual de Beauvoir was in the midst of completing her seminal 1949 feminist work The Second Sex and still committed to her relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre, who was her partner for 51 years until his death in 1980.
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